'Breakfast at Tiffany's' added to US film registry

This image released by Paramount Home Video shows a movie poster from "Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn. Memorable movies, including "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," "Dirty Harry," "A League of Their Own" and "The Matrix" are being preserved for their enduring significance in American culture as The Library of Congress announces, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012, the slate of films it will induct into the National Film Registry. (AP Photo/Paramount Home Video)
— AP

This image released by Paramount Home Video shows a movie poster from "Breakfast at Tiffany's starring Audrey Hepburn. Memorable movies, including "Breakfast at Tiffany’s," "Dirty Harry," "A League of Their Own" and "The Matrix" are being preserved for their enduring significance in American culture as The Library of Congress announces, Wednesday, Dec. 19, 2012, the slate of films it will induct into the National Film Registry. (AP Photo/Paramount Home Video)
/ AP

Documentaries chosen this year include "The Times of Harvey Milk," made in 1984 about San Francisco's first openly gay elected official who was assassinated in 1978, and "Samsara: Death and Rebirth in Cambodia" from 1990 about the struggle to rebuild after Pol Pot's rule.

This year's selections include some firsts in film history. The 1914 film "Uncle Tom's Cabin," based on the anti-slavery novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe, had been adapted earlier for movies with white actors in the lead roles. But this version was the first feature-length U.S. film to star a black actor when Sam Lucas was chosen for the part.

The library will also preserve the first "Kodachrome Color Motion Picture Tests" from 1922. The two-color film features leading actresses posing and miming for the camera to demonstrate the new color film. Before then, to show film in color, black and white images either had to be hand-painted or colored with a stenciling process. Inventors, including scientists at Kodak, began experimenting with ways to create true color film.

The Kodachrome test shown at Paragon Studios in New Jersey was the first publicly demonstrated color film that would attract interest from the American film industry. Later Technicolor would become the industry standard.

"Most every major Hollywood film from 1922 through the end of the silent era would have either a Kodachrome color sequence in it or Technicolor color sequence as a way of attracting audience interest," said Pat Loughney, chief of the library's audio visual preservation campus. "It's a technical, historical achievement, but it's important to the progress of inventive work that made motion pictures successful."